World At Net · Global Economy · October 2026
Congestion, ageing infrastructure, labour disputes and customs delays are quietly reshaping what reaches our tables, our pharmacies and our factories.
Every morning, thousands of ships are somewhere between a factory and a shelf. They carry the wheat that becomes bread, the fertiliser that grows the wheat, the insulin that sits in a refrigerator, the circuit boards inside a hospital monitor and the steel that will become tomorrow’s bridge. Most of the people who depend on this cargo will never see a container terminal. They see the finished product, the price tag and, only when something goes wrong, an empty shelf. The ports where all of this changes hands are among the least glamorous and most consequential machines in the global economy, and in the autumn of 2026 they are under more strain than at any point in recent memory.
The United Nations trade body UNCTAD says that more than 80 percent of the world’s goods trade by volume travels by sea, and the share is higher still for developing countries. So when a port slows, a union walks out, a canal narrows or a strait closes, a large part of economic life feels it within weeks. This article looks at what happens when ports stop working properly: how congestion builds, why ageing infrastructure turns small shocks into long delays, how labour disputes and customs bottlenecks add friction, and how all of it flows through to the food we eat, the medicine we take and the goods factories are able to make. It uses the most recent figures available on 26 October 2026, and where sources disagree, it says so.
Start with the headline number, because it is remarkable. In late August the analytics firm Linerlytica reported that 4.31 million TEU of container ship capacity was stranded waiting for a berth. A TEU, or twenty foot equivalent unit, is the standard measure of container capacity. The figure was the highest ever recorded and above the roughly four million TEU peak of 2022, when the pandemic buying boom overwhelmed the world’s terminals. Clarksons, which also counts ships waiting at anchor, put the total at 11.13 million TEU, another record. In early October, C.H. Robinson estimated that about 12 percent of all container ship capacity was being swallowed by congestion, the highest level in four years.
The Tradlinx Port Congestion Index, which monitors 1,253 ports, rated global congestion as busy at 50.5 out of 100 for the fortnight to 5 October, with the twenty biggest ports scoring 57.3 and 79 percent of waiting vessels sitting at ports classed as congested. In the following fortnight the global score eased to 49.5, but Northeast Asia still held 40 percent of all waiting vessels, and Shenzhen’s four terminals alone showed 275 ships waiting on the reference date.
Waiting is only part of the damage. Drewry found that average ship waiting times in the first seven months of 2026 were nearly double those of the same period in 2019, while the average time a container ship spends in port has risen by 31 percent. When typhoons struck China in early August, berth waits averaged 3.6 days. Sea Intelligence reports that schedule reliability fell from 62.6 percent in June to 56.4 percent in July, and that average delays lengthened from 5.31 to 6.06 days.
It is tempting to read all this as a simple shortage of port capacity, but the truth is more interesting. Drewry’s analysis of nine major ports found that terminal operators expanded capacity by an average of 21 percent between 2019 and 2026, while volumes grew by 28 percent. Capacity grew, but demand grew faster, which pushes terminals towards higher utilisation. A yard running close to its limit looks efficient on a spreadsheet. It also has no slack to absorb a typhoon, a crane breakdown or three ships that were meant to arrive on three different days turning up on the same one. Drewry’s conclusion is that the container system has been tuned for cost rather than resilience, which leaves it brittle whenever demand surges or a disruption lands.
Ships themselves have changed the arithmetic. Vessels have grown so large that each call must now move far more boxes than it once did, and the share of a ship’s time in port spent waiting rather than working has risen. Ocean carriers, aware of the pressure, now control around 45 percent of global container terminal capacity. The companies that move the boxes increasingly own the places where the boxes are handled. That can improve coordination, and it can also concentrate risk in fewer hands.
Congestion also travels. Liner services are chains of port calls, so a delay at one port ripples forward to the next. The typhoons that hit China this summer pushed some carriers to skip ports altogether, and an omitted call can hurt more than a planned blank sailing because cargo is left behind or lands at the wrong hub and misses its connection. Linerlytica noted large volumes waiting at Singapore, Busan and Colombo as well as several Chinese ports, and those transhipment hubs act as amplifiers. A storm in the East China Sea becomes a late delivery in East Africa.
Behind the statistics lies steel and concrete, and a good deal of it is old. In May 2026 the National Association of Waterfront Employers surveyed 25 senior port and terminal executives in the United States. They expect to need about $6.7 billion of cargo handling equipment over the next five years, including more than 100 new or replacement ship to shore cranes. Roughly $2.4 billion of that is for large yard equipment and additional cranes, and nearly $790 million is simply to repair what already exists. The association warned that tariff uncertainty over Chinese manufactured cranes was clouding purchasing decisions at a time when American manufacturing capacity does not match immediate needs.
The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 report card tells a similar story, putting port needs for 2024 to 2033 at nearly $38 billion, with a funding gap of about $13 billion for water transportation if current federal funding levels simply continue. Ageing equipment is not an abstract accounting problem. A crane that is down for a week removes a berth from service, and a berth removed from service in a congested system creates a queue that takes far longer to clear than the repair did.
The problem is global. In India this year, project44 data showed arrival delays at Mundra that could reach 49 days, and departure delays at Nhava Sheva, the gateway known as JNPA, up 118 percent against levels before the crisis, with more than 30,000 containers awaiting routing along the west coast. The analysts pointed to recurring crane failures, bad weather and dense yards as the fragilities that turn a global shock into a prolonged local one.
Efficiency rankings show the same pattern from another angle. The World Bank and S&P Global Market Intelligence published the latest Container Port Performance Index in September 2025, benchmarking 403 ports for the years 2020 to 2024. China’s Yangshan ranked first for the third year running, and 15 of the top 20 ports were in East Asia. The best placed American port, Philadelphia, came 26th. The previous edition had shown the average port call lengthening from 36.8 hours in 2022 to 40.5 hours in 2023, with Cape Town and Ngqura in South Africa at the very bottom. The ports at the foot of such tables are rarely short of ships. They are short of working cranes, deep channels, yard space, rail links and digital systems that talk to each other.
Sometimes a single failure exposes how little redundancy there is. When the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal in March 2021, it blocked one of the world’s busiest waterways for six days. When a ship struck Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March 2024, the collapse shut the port’s main channel for weeks. Neither was a labour dispute or a war. Both were reminders that trade runs through narrow physical places.
No honest account of port stress in 2026 can avoid the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war that began on 28 February, around 125 large commercial vessels passed through it every day, according to Kpler data cited by Reuters. Danish Shipping, using S&P Maritime Portal data, counted 3,671 transits in February, roughly 130 a day, with container ships making up about 16 percent and carrying a combined 2.96 million TEU of capacity. In the first four days of March only 25 transits were recorded. BIMCO estimated that about 130 container ships, around 1.5 percent of world fleet capacity, were stranded inside the Gulf and that roughly 3 percent of global container volume could no longer move. Container Trades Statistics later estimated that between 1.8 and 2 million TEU of cargo was lost to Gulf disruption in the first half of the year, with regional imports down 21 percent and exports down 31 percent.
Traffic has not stopped entirely. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 117 transits by vessels not linked to Iran in the week of 14 to 20 September, up from 106 the week before, and noted that feeder ships operating out of Abu Dhabi were running some of the last regular container services through the strait. But the threat level remains severe, and early October showed how fragile any recovery is. On 6 October only seven commodity vessels crossed, the fewest since 23 July, after attacks on tankers in the preceding week reached their highest weekly level since the war began. Against a prewar norm of about 125 ships a day, even a good day is now a fraction of normal.
Energy shows how much improvisation a crisis can force, and how limited it is. Kpler reported that crude oil crossing the strait fell 27 percent from a wartime high to at least 10.1 million barrels a day in the first week of October. Yet exports from the Gulf of Oman coast and the Red Sea rose to 6.7 million barrels a day, more than twice their level before the war, as producers pushed oil through whatever outlets remained. Before the war, close to a fifth of global oil supply and more than a fifth of liquefied natural gas trade passed through Hormuz, so every barrel rerouted by pipeline or truck is a barrel that now depends on a different, and often smaller, set of ports.
The Red Sea and Suez route is still badly damaged too. BIMCO reported that Suez Canal transits in the first week of 2026 were about 60 percent below the same week of 2023, before diversions around the Cape of Good Hope began, and CMA CGM again suspended its Suez services when fighting escalated early this year.
Then there is Panama. A strong El Niño has cut rainfall over the canal’s catchment, with June rainfall 17 percent below average, and the Panama Canal Authority has tightened draft limits repeatedly this year. Since early September the Neopanamax locks have been limited to nine slots a day, and the older Panamax locks first to 25 and then, from 15 September, to 23, bringing the daily average to roughly 32 to 34 transits against normal capacity of about 40. In August, Neopanamax vessels were waiting up to 11 days, and in early September an LPG carrier, SK Gas, paid a record $5.3 million for a priority slot. A former canal administrator, Jorge Quijano, estimates that every 30 centimetres of lost draft means about 200 fewer containers aboard a ship. NOAA puts the chance of a strong or very strong El Niño this winter at 91 percent, and the World Meteorological Organization expects it to persist into February 2027. In the drought of 2023 and 2024, daily transits fell from 36 to roughly 22.
The chokepoint ledger, October 2026
| Passage | What changed | Latest reported figures |
|---|---|---|
| Strait of Hormuz | Effectively closed to normal traffic since 28 February | About 125 large ships a day before the war; seven commodity vessels on 6 October |
| Suez and Red Sea | Carriers still diverting around the Cape of Good Hope | Transits about 60% below 2023 levels in the first week of 2026 |
| Panama Canal | El Niño drought, draft cuts and slot limits | 9 Neopanamax and 23 Panamax slots a day; waits up to 11 days; record $5.3M slot bid |
| Northeast Asian ports | Typhoons and bunched arrivals | 275 ships waiting at Shenzhen’s four terminals (to 18 October) |
The cruel arithmetic is that these shocks are landing together. Ships diverted from Hormuz and the Red Sea add traffic to Panama and the long route around Africa. More ships on fewer routes means more bunching at ports, and bunching creates the very queues described at the start of this article.
Labour disputes are a different kind of shock because they are usually visible in advance. Everyone can see them coming, and yet the damage is rarely confined to the days of the stoppage.
In Germany, the union ver.di and the Central Association of German Seaport Operators have been deadlocked over pay for about 11,000 port employees. Employers offered 5.1 percent over 19 months, and workers rejected it. In August a warning strike lasting 24 hours spread across six seaports, with around 2,100 workers walking out in Hamburg alone. On 2 September a further warning strike began, expected to run for 48 hours, with container deliveries, pickups and transhipment all suspended. In the Netherlands, dockworkers announced in March a strike of at least five days over the government’s social security plans, warning that port operations would largely stop.
North America supplies the cautionary tales. In October 2024, some 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association stopped work at 36 East and Gulf Coast ports, halting roughly half of American ocean shipping in the union’s first national strike since 1977. It lasted three days. Nearly 100,000 containers were waiting to be unloaded in the New York area alone. Analysts had warned that every day of a port strike takes four to six days to clear, which means a three day stoppage can leave a backlog lasting two to three weeks. At the heart of the dispute were wages and a union demand to ban further automation of cranes, gates and trucks. Top scale workers were then earning a base of $39 an hour, a little over $81,000 a year. A new six year agreement was ratified in early 2025.
Canada tells a related story. The 13 day British Columbia port strike of 2023 and the November 2024 lockouts at Montreal and Quebec both ended not in negotiated settlements but through federal intervention and binding arbitration. The pattern matters. Ports are strategic chokepoints, workers know it, governments know it, and the leverage runs in both directions.
It would be easy to cast dockworkers as the villains of these stories, and it would be wrong. Their work is physically dangerous, their skills are hard to replace, and the automation they fear is real. The deeper problem is a system running so close to its limit that a one day walkout becomes a month of disruption. When there is no slack, every grievance becomes a crisis.
If congestion is what happens to ships outside the port, and strikes are what happens to labour inside it, customs is what happens at the gate. Boxes can sit for days after they are unloaded because paperwork is wrong, a risk engine has flagged them or an inspector has not yet arrived. Every one of those days consumes free time, the grace period before storage and detention charges begin, and every one occupies space the next ship needs.
In the United States, customs attorneys and brokers reported a rise in holds on containers from China at Los Angeles and Long Beach during 2026, as heavier tariffs and stronger analytics focused attention on valuation, country of origin and unfamiliar sourcing patterns. The Journal of Commerce reported in July that heightened security at American seaports was raising demurrage risk for importers. The arithmetic is unforgiving. Free time at major American ports typically runs three to five days, and a container sent to a centralised examination station can burn 5 to 14 days before release.
Chattogram, the principal port of Bangladesh, shows what happens when reform meets old habits. World Bank logistics data show average import container dwell time rising from 7.8 days in 2023 to 8.3 days in 2024, and customs officials say it stayed above 11 days through 2025 despite digitisation. Officials ask importers to file a bill of entry within 10 hours of a cargo’s arrival, yet many take more than a week. Ships there spend about half their port time waiting at anchor, against a global average of roughly one third.
The lesson is that customs delay is the most fixable of the frictions in this article, because it is made of decisions and data rather than steel. Risk based inspection, pre arrival processing and genuinely connected single window systems cost far less than a new terminal. They only work, though, when traders, brokers and officials all play their parts.
Food is where port failures become personal fastest, and also where their effects are most easily misunderstood. The immediate risk is rarely an empty shelf. It is the long chain of inputs behind the shelf, and the time it takes for damage there to surface.
Perishable cargo has the least tolerance for delay. A container of bananas, one of the goods held up by the 2024 American strike, ripens on a clock set at the plantation, not by the shipping schedule. Refrigerated containers depend on power at the terminal and an unbroken cold chain at every handover. A few days of waiting at anchor can turn a profitable shipment into a write off.
The deeper vulnerability lies upstream, in fertiliser. Estimates of how much of the world’s urea trade depends on Hormuz differ with how it is counted. The International Fertilizer Association puts West Asia’s share of global urea exports at about a quarter. The International Chamber of Commerce says Gulf producers reliant on the route accounted for roughly 40 percent of global urea trade, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies says nearly half of seaborne urea exports, along with 44 percent of global sulphur production, pass through the strait. Whichever figure one prefers, the dependence is heavy. At the New Orleans import hub, urea jumped from $516 a tonne on 27 February to $683 on 5 March, a 32 percent rise in a single week. The World Bank reported that its fertiliser price index rose 44 percent between February and April and its urea benchmark 82 percent, reaching the highest level since October 2022, with urea above $850 a tonne at the peak.
Prices have since eased from those peaks, but the International Chamber of Commerce warns that lower prices do not demonstrate recovery. The World Bank noted that farmers in the northern hemisphere had mostly secured their supplies early, while the purchasing power of farmers elsewhere weakened sharply. A farmer who skips or halves a nitrogen application will not appear in any statistic until harvest. The consequences arrive with a lag, in smaller yields, tighter grain stocks and higher bread prices months after the ships stopped sailing. The International Food Policy Research Institute’s Joseph Glauber has argued that the wider effect on food prices will come less from commodity swings than from energy costs passing through the system.
Medicine is the other cargo where delay carries a human price, and the way ports touch it is subtler than many assume. The most critical drugs and vaccines mostly move by air, so why does a story about ports belong here? Because ports, airports and factories are one connected system, and a shock in one part reprices all the others.
When the war began, industry data cited by Reuters suggested that over a fifth of global air cargo, the main route for life saving drugs and vaccines, was exposed to Middle East disruption. Air freight capacity fell by about 21 percent after Gulf airspace was disrupted, and freight rates jumped 55 to 70 percent in early March, leaving manufacturers with little room to absorb the cost. By midsummer, C.H. Robinson reported that air freight rates out of India had risen 200 to 350 percent on some routes, with delays straining refrigerated cargo. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients pass through Gulf region hubs before reaching Indian manufacturers, which means a closed strait can slow a tablet that never touches it.
The American Society of Health System Pharmacists reports that American drug shortages trended upwards in the early months of 2026, with roughly three quarters of active shortages having begun in the last four years, and about 15 percent involving controlled substances. These shortages cannot all be blamed on the Gulf. They show how thin the margin already was before the latest shock arrived.
Port and shipping problems also reach medicine through humbler items. Analysts have warned about vial stoppers, the plastics used for intravenous bags and the packaging materials that every sterile product requires. As Moody’s David Weeks put it, it’s not always a shortage of the medicine itself. A drug can be perfectly manufactured and still fail to reach a patient because a component of its packaging is stuck at anchor. Countries that rely heavily on imported ingredients and finished medicines, Pakistan among them, are exposed twice: once through the cost of freight and again through the unreliability of schedules.
For factories, the equation is about time as much as price. Modern manufacturing grew up around just in time delivery, in which components arrive when they are needed and warehouses stay lean. It is a brilliant system when schedules are reliable. When only 56 percent of ships arrive on time and the late ones average six days behind, a manufacturer has two choices: hold far more stock, which ties up cash, or risk stopping a line because one missing part has not shown up. Each choice costs money, and neither shows up neatly in a trade statistic.
The costs are already being passed along. Major carriers announced Panama related surcharges of at least $100 per TEU. Bunker fuel prices have climbed as the Hormuz crisis drags on. Insurers charge more for dangerous waters, and carriers add fees for every detour. BIMCO estimated that the closure of the strait directly affects about 5 percent of global ship demand, and noted that even if transits resume soon, significant uncertainty would remain. Sulphur, a basic input for fertilisers and industrial chemistry, adds another layer, since a large share of it is shipped through the same narrow water.
There is also a quieter cost, which is planning. A procurement manager who cannot trust a delivery date builds in buffers, orders earlier, spreads orders across suppliers and pays for extra storage. Multiply that behaviour across millions of firms and the result is a permanent tax on trade, paid not in tariffs but in uncertainty.
For Pakistan, these stories are not abstract. The Hormuz closure turned Karachi into an unexpected beneficiary. Around 8,300 containers of transhipment cargo were handled in all of 2025, and in the first 24 days of March 2026 the figure was between 8,313 and 8,860 depending on the official count. Port Qasim handled more than 400,000 tonnes of petroleum products and LPG in March, far above its usual monthly pace. Gwadar handled around 11,000 containers in April, more than in the whole of 2025. Islamabad offered discounts of up to 60 percent on port fees from 18 March, and in July Karachi Port Trust cut transhipment charges by 65 percent, set a target of 20 percent more container traffic within two years and began deepening the East Wharf channel to 15.5 metres.
Geography has given Pakistan a rare opening. Gwadar sits about 400 kilometres from Hormuz on the safe side of the Arabian Sea, and when around 3,000 Iran bound containers piled up at Karachi and Port Qasim through March and April, the government opened road corridors to move them, activating the transit route on 25 April.
Yet opportunity and readiness are different things. Reporting by The Friday Times in May argued that the surge looks more like a missed chance than a triumph. Average clearance dwell at Pakistani ports runs three to six days against an international target of 48 hours, and a 2024 report by the Pakistan National Shipping Corporation found that 63 percent of containers at Karachi exceeded their free time allowances. Discounts attract a first visit, but they do not persuade a major shipping line to commit to a route if the port, the customs process and the road and rail links behind it cannot move cargo quickly. If Pakistan wants to keep what the crisis delivered, the work lies in dwell times, digital clearance and hinterland connections, not in tariffs alone.
What would a sturdier system look like? The honest answer is that it would look less efficient on paper. Resilience means spare berths, spare cranes, spare inventory and spare routes, all of which cost money in the good years and pay back only in the bad ones. Drewry has noted that the container sector is oriented towards cost optimisation rather than resilience, and the figures above show the consequence.
It is worth remembering that the system has shown it can improvise. When Gulf airspace closed, pharmaceutical carriers flew into Jeddah, Riyadh and Oman and moved cargo onward by road. When Hormuz shut, Abu Dhabi organised feeder ships to keep a thin container service alive, Gulf of Oman terminals took on cargo, and Pakistan opened land corridors from its southern ports. These workarounds saved a great deal of trade. But each one was an emergency patch built under pressure, and each one passed costs to someone: higher freight rates, longer journeys, congestion in the alternative port. Improvisation is a sign of a flexible system, and it is also a reminder of how often flexibility is being asked to substitute for planning.
Several measures follow from the evidence. Ports need sustained investment in cranes, dredging and yard capacity, funded before equipment fails rather than after. Customs authorities can cut dwell time with risk based inspection and pre arrival clearance, which are cheap compared with concrete. Employers and unions can reduce the damage of disputes by bargaining early and by agreeing transparent rules on automation, so that technology is introduced alongside job security instead of against it. Shippers and governments can hold strategic buffers of the goods whose absence hurts most: fertiliser, essential medicines, packaging for sterile products and spare parts for critical machinery. Importers can spread their orders across several ports instead of betting everything on one gateway. And carriers that now own so much terminal capacity can use it to smooth traffic rather than simply to secure their own berths.
None of this is glamorous, and that may be the point. The failures described in this article rarely arrive as a single dramatic collapse. They accumulate quietly: a crane out of service here, a customs hold there, a queue of ships lengthening by a day. By the time shoppers notice a price rise or a patient hears that a prescription is delayed, the chain of causes stretches back across oceans and months.
Ports are the places where the abstraction of global trade meets physical reality, and in 2026 that reality is pushing back. The ships are still sailing and the cranes are still lifting, but the margin for error has narrowed to almost nothing, and the shocks keep coming from every direction at once. The question for governments, businesses and ordinary consumers is whether we treat this as a temporary disturbance or as a warning about how we have built the world’s supply lines. The evidence suggests it is the second, and that the cost of ignoring it will be counted not only in freight rates but in the price of bread, the availability of medicine and the jobs on the factory floor.
Sources and currency. Figures draw on reporting and data from Linerlytica, Clarksons, C.H. Robinson, Tradlinx, Drewry, Sea Intelligence, UNCTAD, BIMCO, Kpler, Lloyd’s List Intelligence, Danish Shipping, Container Trades Statistics, the Panama Canal Authority, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, the National Association of Waterfront Employers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the World Bank, S&P Global, project44, the International Chamber of Commerce, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Reuters, The Friday Times, Business Recorder and Arab News. Figures reflect reporting available on 26 October 2026. Several situations described here, especially in the Strait of Hormuz and at the Panama Canal, are still developing, so readers should check live sources for the latest position.
Medical note. This article discusses the logistics of medicine supply and is not medical advice. Anyone who relies on a regular prescription should speak to a doctor or pharmacist about availability, and anyone with urgent or severe symptoms should seek emergency care immediately.
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